WHODUNIT? LOVER SAYS `NOT ME'
UNSOLVED KILLING TRIGGERS SPECULATION

JOHN SPRINGERCourant Staff Writer

Eight hours before she would discover the lifeless body of Louis ``Pete'' LaFontaine, Mary Ann Yalanis turned her 12-year-old Lincoln into the driveway of his Stafford Avenue home and cut the engine. She says that as she sat in the Towne Car outside the Tudor-style house that was legally hers, she thought about going in but decided against it. LaFontaine, her 53-year- old boyfriend and business partner of 10 years, had told her two hours earlier that he was tired and wanted to stay home alone that night. It was cold and late, Yalanis remembers, but she wanted to be sure that he was home and was alone. She told police later that only a nightlight was visible through a window and that LaFontaine's aging appliance repair van was parked in front of the garage where he once stored vintage Corvettes. There were no signs of LaFontaine's other girlfriends, a secretary and a schoolteacher Yalanis knew only by name and from what LaFontaine would say about them to upset her. Satisfied that LaFontaine was home and indeed alone that night, Feb. 9, Yalanis drove the mile to her mother's home on Elizabeth Road and went to bed. Yalanis said she was asleep at her mother's house when, according to police, someone entered LaFontaine's second-floor bedroom and fired two bullets into his head, killing him. A third bullet pierced the lining of the waterbed, which was leaking heavily when Yalanis entered the bedroom shortly before 6:30 a.m. to ask LaFontaine why he wasn't yet at work. ``I came here to do laundry. I freaked out when I found him,'' Yalanis said during an interview at the house, the scene of what police are calling Bristol's first real whodunit in decades. The ensuing seven months have brought no arrests, but Yalanis said she is feeling the stress of police detectives and relatives of LaFontaine who have become more and more accusatory lately. At a probate court hearing in June, attended by two police detectives and another of LaFontaine's girlfriends, the victim's siblings argued unsuccessfully that Yalanis should not be named executrix of his small estate because she was a suspect. ``I want to know why this happened. I am very angry that the family blames me for his death and the police blame me for his death. I had nothing to do with it,'' said Yalanis, 40, who called 911 after discovering LaFontaine's body in bed. ``Family members go by and call me a murderer and I get anonymous phone calls and hangups: `We know you are involved. We know you did it.' '' Yalanis denies any involvement in the crime, but during a seven- hour interview with detectives she described a rocky, volatile romantic and business relationship with LaFontaine that spanned 10 years. She readily told police that for two weeks she had not been sleeping at the house she shared with LaFontaine. Hoping to be upfront about what she concedes was a dysfunctional relationship with an uncertain future, Yalanis also told detectives about how LaFontaine would show her nude photos of the other women in his life. ``Pete could be real sick sometimes, but I just accepted it after awhile,'' Yalanis said. ``That's just the way he was, but we were still together. He still introduced me as his girlfriend.'' Yalanis said she also accepted regular cocaine use by LaFontaine, as long as it was discreet, and is frustrated that police have not taken seriously her theory that he was killed over drugs. ``I think it could be drug-related,'' she said. ``Everyone close to him knew about his drugs. We used to say to him, `Do some coke so you'll calm down.' '' Police have not ruled out or accepted any theories, including Yalanis' hunch, said the lead investigator on the case, Det. Roy Bredefeld. Although a search of LaFontaine's business, vehicles and house at 187 Stafford Ave. turned up no traces of drug activity, Bredefeld said, ``That door is not closed. We are continuing to pursue several avenues and leads.'' LaFontaine's siblings doubt the drug theory and suggested that Yalanis made it up to get suspicious detectives off her back. ``Drugs? Absolutely not,'' said Norman LaFontaine, of New Britain. ``Pete was a workaholic. I don't think you can work the hours he did and be on drugs . . . She could be trying to throw them off.'' Rita Hayden of Bristol said she doubts her brother used or sold any illegal drugs since the 1970s, when he served a brief prison term in California for a narcotics violation. ``Pete was not on dope, I can tell you that. I know he wasn't,'' Hayden said. ``Maybe way back when, but not lately.'' Allen Green, LaFontaine's nephew and employee in the appliance business, said he saw no evidence of drug use or dealing and disputes Yalanis' claim that her relationship with LaFontaine was not unraveling. ``A week before he died, we went to lunch and he told me that he was going to sign the business over to me,'' Green said. ``Ninety percent of it was in her name and he was trying to get it back.''

Growing Frustrations

Upset that rumors and speculation continue to focus on her, Yalanis said she believes the crime will go unsolved as long as family members and detectives cling to what she called their leading theory: that she recruited someone to kill LaFontaine because he was cutting her out of his life. ``I really wish they would get off this dead-end road with me and my family. I want to know who did this, but they are not going to solve this until they get off this dead-end road,'' she said. Yalanis said one such dead-end took detectives to a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where her ex-husband is serving a 10-year sentence. William S. Rogers was convicted of trying to hire an undercover federal agent to blow up a 15-year-old family member who planned to testify in 1991 that Rogers sexually abused her. Police would confirm only that they have interviewed more than 100 people in several states. Detectives deny focusing exclusively on any one suspect, pointing out that they would be remiss if they did not question Yalanis and other people close to LaFontaine in pursuit of his killer or killers. ``This is one of the most difficult cases we have had in a long time. We don't have a lot of physical evidence, a witness or the weapon,'' said Bredefeld, the lead detective. ``Someone in this community knows something about this crime. We will solve it, I'm certain.'' Detectives have kept the investigation going by reconstructing the victim's movements and state of mind in the weeks, days and hours before he met his untimely death. LaFontaine, who liked to be called ``Pete,'' loved many things that life offered him -- cigars, twin Yorkshire terriers, classic cars and the inflated stature that he felt from carrying a wad of cash in his workpants. He also loved women, something Yalanis said she learned to accept over the years. A Bristol native, Mary Ann Yalanis was a teenager waiting tables when she first met LaFontaine; their relationship started years later. The day before the shooting was a typical one for LaFontaine, who was well-known in Bristol as a capable fix-it man who made house calls to repair appliances he sold out of the Park Street shop that Yalanis runs. Yalanis owned LaFontaine's home and business on paper, but his reputation as reliable and hardworking kept Accurate Appliance Repair and Rental going. He arrived at the shop around daybreak that morning and spent several hours performing repairs in-house. The balance of the workday was consumed on service calls and collecting money from people renting appliances. Around 5 p.m., LaFontaine spent several hours helping his nephew, Green, who was remodeling his new house on Barlow Street. Yalanis, meanwhile, was in West Haven visiting her brother, John Yalanis, who had undergone surgery for a staph infection at the Veterans Administration hospital there. She said the last time she spoke to LaFontaine was during an 8:30 p.m. cell phone call in which he told her he was tired and not to come over. LaFontaine's sister, Rita Hayden, scoffed at Yalanis' claim that she was not estranged and being pushed out of the picture. ``He wanted her to go out on her own and she wouldn't go. He was trying to get her out of his life and she wouldn't leave,'' Hayden said. That LaFontaine may have said such things does not surprise Yalanis, who explained that she found himto be a manipulator who often pitted people against each other and told each what they wanted to hear. She insisted that other than a $125,000 life insurance policy that LaFontaine's siblings are fighting her over, LaFontaine's death has left her without a valued companion and large debts on a heavily mortgaged house and business. LaFontaine signed over the deed to 187 Stafford Ave. to Yalanis in 1989 ``in consideration for love and affection,'' city land records show. Yalanis said both the house and the appliance business were in her name because she gave LaFontaine $75,000 to bail the business out of debt in the late 1980s. ``I was his friend. I was his companion. I was his shoulder to cry on,'' she said, choking back emotion. ``I loved Pete. I had no reason to want him dead.''